When I arrived at Oxford, I experienced what many would call a cultural shock. Beyond the flamboyant parties and visible micro-aggressions of the gowned elite, my physics and math courses felt radically different than before. The lectures were significantly more impersonal; the professors were a bit hostile; the crowd was huge, and everyone had something to prove.
This would have felt rather normal if I had decided to continue my education in Argentina, but, instead, I had adapted to the American education model—at a school like Northwestern no less, which had a fairly small physics program. Not only that, I spent half of my undergraduate education surrounded by Ph D students, taking the same classes as them. But a masters in England was different.
It felt bigger, more ominous. Most people opted to study and solve problem sets alone, and when we tried to work in groups there was an expectation to perform as the "genius" type. I had Ph D offers from Harvard and Oxford straight from undergrad, and I felt like I had to prove I deserved it.
It was partly my fault. I did feel the need to brag in order to be taken seriously, but it backfired on me. It was awkward at first, but the environment shifted drastically mid Michaelmas term.
Pretty soon our discussions and ego games shifted from meaningless whiteboard debates to my classmates simply stating "I just asked Chat GPT how to do it."Chat GPT? This was in late 2024. I had heard of AI in the past. Everyone was raving about it all year, but no one I knew had used it for class.
I saw people complaining about how much water it used, how terrible it was for the environment and a few people even stated that it might kill us all someday. This felt like complete nonsense to me. I recall when I was writing my undergraduate thesis in mid-spring.
I opened instagram to procrastinate for a few minutes, and I saw a popular "Ph D influencer" (whatever that means) say she put her name in Chat GPT, and it blasted a lot of information about her and how great she was. I thought it was a bit scary for a "website" to pull up all your information like that (and I found the endeavour a bit narcissistic), but I was deeply curious, so I gave the chatbot a chance. I remember asking some question about scattering amplitudes, and it replied with nonsense.
So, I pressed it and asked again with more detail, and it said:"You should ask a theoretical physicist."And at that point, that was enough for me to close the window and never open it again. That is, until a few months later, I was studying at Oxford with my "friends" at the time, and they kept raving about how Chat GPT could do their homework. Problem sets for most of the MMath Phys courses at Oxford are not graded.
Real grades come from exams or your dissertation. A few classes require you to submit homework, but 'passing' is enough. I thought it was a bit meaningless to ask a chatbot to do everything for you when the entire purpose of the homework was to serve as exam practice.
Yet, in January 2025, I found myself stuck trying to solve one QFT question, so I asked the chatbot like my friends recommended, and, again, it said some bullshit. I didn't look at it again until a few months later. It was a bit odd how the idea of "homework" had seemed to decay.
Before, at least, we had the decency to look at Stack Overflow, and scout for similar problems or problem solving techniques that could help, but now suddenly people weren't even doing that. They just asked Chat GPT to do everything. It defeated the purpose of doing homework to be honest.
Though, I think we had lost that a while ago. I always thought that beyond practicing for the exam, problem sets were great to learn what collaboration during problem solving is like. But in reality, collaboration has rarely been part of my reality as a student.
The last time I recall truly collaborating with fellow students was in my freshman year of college. I was taking multivariable calculus with a bunch of engineerin...
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing